


Like Real People Do

by narcolepticbadger



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Maze catches feelings and doesn't quite know what to do with them, Missing Scene, Post-Episode: s02e18 The Good the Bad and the Crispy, Pre-Femslash, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-19 06:31:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12404928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narcolepticbadger/pseuds/narcolepticbadger
Summary: Maze thought she knew everything about torture until, suddenly, there was a human dying in her arms and an interminable night in the waiting room of a hospital and a pile of her own broken promises to cut herself against.Or: Maze waits, wonders, and blames herself for more than a few of the disasters that have befallen Dr. Linda Martin ever since the combined forces of heaven and hell invited themselves into her life.





	Like Real People Do

For all the things Maze had yet to understand about humans — and there were many, if the people of Los Angeles were any indication of the broader population’s tendency toward living along a faultline of stupidity and contradiction and a certain willing recklessness that managed to surprise her even after all these millennia — she knew, perhaps better than anyone, how to make them  _hurt_.

How to find the weak spot hidden in the curve of their throats with her knife. How much heat to apply, and where, to make skin blister, then char. How to coax confessions, and pleas, and a fascinating variety of screams from them as she worked. How they sounded when they begged for an end, a final reprieve, and how she smiled (every inch of her a sharpness) as she denied them again.

Oh, yes, she had been something of a collector of human suffering, and she had prided herself on that knowledge, on her carefully curated set of tools; she missed it still, the tactility of torturing someone who knew they deserved it, the  _intimacy_ , in some deep partition of herself she tried to keep locked away in her new life.

It was what she had been made for, after all.

Tasked with learning the intricacies of their mortality, and of their guilt, and honing the edges of both until each sinner ran themselves through with self-built swords, over and over for an eternity, all under her patient, whispering watch.

Maze had been devoted to her duties, and now the memories, the hard-won expertise, just made her feel sick, because it meant looking at every human wound, every scar, and understanding with visceral clarity what had been done to them, down to the strain of desperation (or worse, the terrible silence) that must have echoed in their cries.

And maybe that didn’t matter so much when the damage in question was done to some anonymous unfortunate, or to one of the dirtbags she tangled with while bounty hunting (she was still a demon, one with no use for sentimentality or mercy or softness), but when it was  _Linda_ —

She swallowed hard, muscles tensing against the unpleasant tang of nausea slinking up the back of her tongue, and tried to find her anger instead. Anger was productive, or (because the doctor would object to that philosophy, probably) at least it was something better than sinking under the weight of helplessness, and so she let her fists tighten and ready themselves for a fight, for all that there was nothing  _to_ fight within easy reach.

Hospitals didn’t like scenes, and Maze suspected this one would like having their waiting room chairs destroyed even less, even if they were too angular for anyone to sit in comfortably for more than half a minute. She settled for picking apart an already half-undone seam, worrying at the threads and gouging out wisps of stuffing and daring anyone to come over and stop her.  

She thought the nurses might be eying her warily, as if they could sense her restraints slipping another notch towards lawlessness, and Lucifer was nowhere in sight (she could hate him for that, later) to charm them into bending their rules, into looking the other way while the demon in their midst wreaked mild havoc on their furniture.

She wondered what they thought of her, knowing that people tended to brand her as disreputable, even dangerous, in the best of times, when her human face was firmly in place and she  _wasn’t_ bearing marks of her own from a recent brawl, colored with someone else’s blood.

She couldn’t remember what she had said to the women in white coats, what explanation she had given stumbling through their doors with a dying (she flinched again at that word, at that reality) woman in her arms besides  _help me._ And if they thought she had been involved somehow, if she had been the one to hurt Linda, well, they weren’t exactly wrong, were they?

She and Lucifer and Amenadiel had known how lethal the Goddess was, even clothed in that mannequin-pretty skin — they had  _known_ how close she was edging to a full nuclear meltdown, and instead of protecting their friends, instead of making sure the stupidly mortal among them were safe, they had lost themselves to bickering and scheming and feeling their own miniature betrayals so deeply that they had simply… forgotten to keep a weather eye on the doctor until it was almost too late, despite how thoroughly tied up Linda had become in their problems along the way.

Despite the breathtakingly obvious truth that those standing too close to the fire — and they had all but led Linda straight into the heart of an inferno — were bound to get burned.

Maze could accept that level of near-sightedness, that brash disregard for consequences, from Lucifer (hell, she  _expected_ it from him), and perhaps Amenadiel, who often kept a curious sort of distance from even the people he purported to  _like_.

But she had been the one to make promises about fixing things, about friendship, only to get distracted by things that seemed so painfully unimportant now. She was Linda’s tribe, and Linda was hers, despite them never quite getting around to swearing it in blood, and there was no greater failing than forsaking those bonds, than somehow  _forgetting_ to have someone’s back when they had always had yours.

Someone should have been there.

_She_ should have been there.

It came over her the way it always did, that all-at-once rush into lightheadedness that meant she was going to do something stupid, something violent, and this was how she knew that no matter how long she spent in the company of humans, she could never be like them, not truly. She was free-falling on instinct, on that compulsive desire to  _hurt_ , and before she could guess where her urges might find an outlet, it was done: one arm of her shitty hospital chair held snapped-clean in her hand like a bone, and a corridor of startled eyes, like so many deer, alighting upon her.

The fury drained out of her as quickly as it had taken over, and Maze felt herself calm again, the kind of devastating calm that descended after a storm had howled itself into (and past) exhaustion.

Mindful of the scrutiny, she stood, eased herself over into the next intact chair, and laid the crook of metal across her lap like an offering, as though to indicate to the nurses and all the others stranded in waiting room purgatory that she meant no harm, that perhaps her lapse into unearthly strength had been some sort of optical illusion, merely imagined, or the kind of adrenaline-fueled grief that allowed mothers to rip two-ton cars off of their children.

They watched her, and she watched them, and after a beat too long of shared appraisal, no one lifted a hand to summon security.

That was something, at least.

.

.

She couldn’t keep track of time here, its spider-crawl of movement — quick, and then slow,  _slow_ , determined not to be rushed — confounding her usually-attuned senses with the suggestion that anything from five minutes to five weeks had passed her by. By the wall clock’s reckoning, she had been stuck in this stasis for going on three hours, all without a sliver of news or a sympathetic glance, and even the goddamn TV seemed to be running in the same boundless loop, cycling between reruns of  _Jeopardy!_ and the hourly news bulletin until Maze could answer every question almost before it was asked.

_What is Impressionism, Alex? What is the Warsaw Pact? What is —?_

Amenadiel, moving with the weariness of the very old and a little unsteady when he swayed down into the chair next to hers, apparently unbothered by the missing armrest, asked only, “How is she?”

“Alive,” she said, because it had been true when they wheeled Linda away, and because they hadn’t told her any differently, and because if she stopped believing it, if she stopped repeating the word to herself…

It was the only word she could manage, and Amenadiel nodded in more than understanding, and that was enough.

She remembered to thank him, sometime later — she could not say when, still caught in the slow, timeless descent of things — and then they drifted into silence. She was glad for his companionable sort of distance, really, as if that steadiness might be catching, might convince them both that everything was well,  _would_ be well.

Neither of them, she imagined, particularly wanted to talk about his mother at the moment. Not when Lucifer was missing, and Linda was bleeding on a table somewhere, and Maze was sitting with a viable weapon in her hands.

There was another shift sideways through time, and a woman in creased scrubs, her surgical mask hanging loose about her neck, appeared at Maze’s elbow out of nowhere, and suddenly there was too much information, a litany of medical terms and a thorough recounting of damages that Maze didn’t want to hear (she had been there, she had  _seen_ ). She felt the slight pressure of Amenadiel’s hand against her arm when she began to snake herself forward, to demand the simple yes-or-no answer the surgeon seemed to be so deliberately withholding. And then…

And then, what a miraculous word  _recovery_ was, like a pearl to overturn again and again in her mouth until the edges wore smooth and perfect.

Of course there were other words, ones that Maze didn’t care for half so much, explaining why they couldn’t see Linda yet, and the necessity of intensive care and cautious optimism when dealing with these kinds of injuries, and so she left Amenadiel to nod in the right places and thank the doctor properly while she stalked off, relief pairing strangely with anxiety where it nestled under her skin.

She was happy for her friend,  _more_ than happy, but there was some bitter tinge to the sweetness, a quickening in her blood that scared her for all the things (too many things) it was making her feel. Like trying to force an entire sea through narrow channels, and getting swept away, pulled breathlessly under, in the process.

She had strayed several corridors away, moving aimlessly, by the time Amenadiel caught up with her again, this time armed with coffee in fragile styrofoam cups. She took one, despite the dubiousness of its contents, if only to occupy her hands.

“So that’s good news, right?”

She  _mmm_ ed, opting to burn her tongue and a fair swathe of the roof of her mouth rather than answer properly, and,  _god_ , how she wished she had something alcoholic up her sleeve to make all of this — particularly the hideous coffee — more bearable.

_Note to self_ , she thought: _vodka._   _Always bring vodka._

“Why are we drinking hospital coffee, again?” she managed to ask around her grimace. “This stuff tastes like motor oil.”

Amenadiel shrugged, swallowing and fighting down a look of disgust himself. “It’s what people do, isn’t it?”

Right. These were the things real people did, all of this drinking coffee from machines, and complaining about the shit flavor of said coffee, and speaking in polite, patient voices while a whole microcosm of others — fathers, friends, lovers — hurt or healed, lived or died, in the liminal spaces around them.

Lucifer had the decency to look guilty, at least, when he finally ambled into the waiting room, finding Maze and Amenadiel in the gloomy middle of their third cups of coffee, the acting-like-ordinary-humans thing having devolved into something of a drinking game, a test of endurance between them for lack of anything better to do.  

A grim look passed between the brothers, one of unspoken recognition — about their mother, and everything that had happened in the hours before, Maze had no doubt — and it was just one more reminder that she now moved in a slightly separate sphere from them, from  _him_ , whom she had served beside for so long. She was her own master, now, which was fine, until it made her feel utterly alone.

Lucifer’s rare expression of sobriety, of remorse, was not-a-little undermined by his immediate shift into making the rounds, turning the full-force of his devilish charm on every member of hospital staff he could get the attention of until they were being ushered into the service elevator and led up to the wing of the ICU normally closed to outside visitors.

She should be grateful, she supposed, for how neatly Lucifer opened doors for them, for how easily they slipped past trivial things like rules and paperwork, and she  _was_ grateful, truth be told, to be freed from the waiting room, to be doing something more than drowning in her own thoughts.

Still, there was an uneasiness in all of their movements, in the uncomfortable silence that had descended again, in the way they kept glancing up and down the deserted hallway outside of the room the nurse had gestured to as if at any moment they might be thrown out. No one wanted to be the first to knock, and so they hovered by the doorknob awkwardly, casting about for excuses to return later, at a more humane hour, and passing them around like a grenade no one wanted to be left holding when the detonation came:  _we don’t want to overwhelm her, now; we don’t even know if she’s awake, or up for visitors…_

(And perhaps that was what they were really waiting for, that hammering blow of dismissal delivered in the phrase  _she doesn’t want to see you_ , and quite rightly at that.)

“Right, this is daft,” Lucifer muttered suddenly, his face set with reproach. “I didn’t come all this way and dazzle the entire hospital team — up to and including a rather hirsute janitor downstairs — to  _not_ see Linda.”

Maze was tempted to roll her eyes and snark at his self-centeredness — oh, poor Lucifer, having to cross half a city and flirt with the common man, all the while missing the part where his friend had been  _dying_ ; such a trial — but she was hardly better than him in all of this.

And so she let him enter the room without a word, because she was enough of a coward to want to know if Linda hated them, hated  _her_ , before she faced the woman herself. Amenadiel retreated to offer them both a semblance of privacy, but Maze stayed close, skulking at the window to watch it all unfold, alert for any signs of impending trainwreck as Lucifer softened his stance, as one would to approach some small wounded bird, and neared the bed.

Linda was awake (barely, perhaps), looking unduly tiny and exposed without the familiar armor of her glasses and perfectly-tailored wardrobe arrayed just so, and though Maze couldn’t hear any of the conversation that passed between them, she could read the relieved slump of Lucifer’s shoulders, the letting down of his burdens, the absolute warmth Linda managed to project even when she was so frail well enough: she had been foolish, impossibly foolish, to have expected anger — to have feared anything of the sort.

Of course the doctor wouldn’t think to assign blame, would deal with this latest catastrophe with the same impenetrable composure she had dealt with all the ones that had come before, and that made it worse, somehow.

Maze could understand the hard, predictable edges of such things as wrath and malice, but the spectrum of human emotion so often dipped into gentler waters that still seemed strange to her.  _Wrong_ , in some deeply unsettling sense, even as she tried to be a part of this world, even as the humans (well, certain humans) kept winning her over to their ways by making her feel like… this.

Like she could become someone who knew the workings of those softer emotions too, the way real people did.

Lucifer stepped back through the door, practically bouncing with the sense of renewal, the lightness, he so often left his therapy sessions with, that momentary awakening that illustrated just how much Linda made him better — how much she made them all better.

“You don’t deserve her.” The words were out before Maze realized they were there, lying in wait behind her teeth. Lucifer faltered, cocked his head slightly at the look of her, and then his eyes (damn him) were charging with something like sympathy.

Maze lowered her gaze, and they both pretended her accusation had been directed at Lucifer alone.

“Don’t I know it,” he sighed, and clasped her shoulder briefly before walking on.

He was always leaving her to her own devices these days, and most of the time Maze didn’t mind, liked testing who she could be without him, but she —  _she_ , who had never known any hesitation in her life before — found herself reluctant to cross this particular threshold alone, as laughable as that was.

The door hadn’t latched, leaving a smoldering-white crack of light to pour into the hallway that seemed to beckon, and so, in increments, she pressed herself against it and passed into the room like a shadow.

Linda’s eyes were closed now, the glasses Lucifer had returned to their rightful place resting crookedly on the end of her nose. Maze scowled at having to clean up his carelessness again, but her desire to set the image to rights (this, at least, she could fix) made it easier to draw near the bed, to reach out.

And she would have sworn that she made no sound, that at the last she decided not to risk disturbing the doctor over something so small and diverted her hand, but Linda must have felt the motion anyway because there she was, looking up at Maze hazily.

“Hey,” she said, her voice rougher than usual but fairly strong, with that particular Linda-smile that seemed (the idea was ridiculous, of course) at times to be reserved for Maze alone.

“Hey.” Maze tried to smile back but nothing seemed to be cooperating, and whatever resulted must have been a pretty pathetic attempt for the way it made Linda screw up her face.

A wry, tired humor flickered through her eyes as she asked, “That bad, huh?”

And they both chuckled, because that was what people did to lighten the mood in moments like this, but Maze’s laughter was the wet kind, and Linda had always been too perceptive for her own good.

“Maze…” she started (and that struck like a knife, the knowledge that all of the sadness held in that word was a response to Maze’s stupid tears), and there was a long minute, too long, of just looking at each other, both unsure what more to say, that made Maze no less mortified for somehow managing to make this about her own pain.

Everything that Maze knew about hospitals, about how people were supposed to behave in them, boiled down to two simple lessons: you drank the terrible coffee people handed to you, and you didn’t cry in front of anyone confined to one of those awful white beds because it would upset them when you were meant to make them feel normal and safe. And here she was, breaking the humans’ damn rules again and doing everything wrong when all she wanted was for Linda, for once, to let someone take care of  _her_.

She was spared the humiliation of trying to explain herself further, since Linda was clearly struggling to stay conscious against the remnants of anaesthesia and torrent of other drugs in her system — they were the good kind of drugs, the ones that made a killing on the underground market, Maze could tell, and she was glad. They could deal with  _that_ minefield of a conversation later, or never, if she got lucky and the doctor didn’t remember any of this in the morning.

Before she drifted off completely, Linda tried to thank her as best she could in her drug-clumsy state, and Maze smiled tightly, brushed it off with a “Yeah, well, I got used to having you around” while wanting to scream herself raw:  _stop, stop it, just_ stop.

In all the time they had known each other, she had never known Linda to be so infuriatingly, devastatingly (it would be funny in almost any other situation)  _wrong_ about something — about everything — before.

It was like the doctor had no instinct for self-preservation at all. No one’s first reaction after being tortured should be to apologize, then to thank the person (demon) who could have protected her and hadn’t — it defied every law, celestial and infernal and mortal alike, that Maze knew.

And that, twinned with the cold truth that she would have never forgiven Linda if she had gone where Maze couldn’t follow, made Maze want to grab the woman and shake her until she understood. To let go only when Linda realized that she couldn’t go on like this, that neither of them could.

Instead, making sure that the doctor was well and truly out, Maze gently worked the glasses free from their crooked mooring, careful not to get the ends tangled in her hair, and set them within easy reach on the bedside table, where Linda would be able to find them herself when she next woke. (Probably. She wasn’t exactly sure how blind Linda was without them.)

She smoothed back the few blonde strands that had fallen forward with the action, such an ordinary gesture, but her fingers idled, tucking and retucking and lingering against the warmth of Linda’s skin, wanting to touch more. But she wouldn’t see Linda any more hurt than she already was, and she couldn’t seem to find any unbroken place to settle her hand.

And she wondered if this was how it always was with humans.

Oh, she had fucked plenty of them before, been intimate that way, but the touching she was doing now — what she wanted to do — was something else entirely, something new and daunting that left her reaching for a tenderness half-learned.

Maze had never before wanted to be this soft, known she  _could_ be, and now it was all she wanted: this precise tenderness, and the sweetly-strange pleasure that followed.

When Amenadiel shook her awake, later, she grumbled him away, hunkering deeper into the chair she had dragged to the very edge of the bed in refusal.

“All right, then, I guess you’re staying,” he said with warm amusement, and so she was.

.

.

The next days passed in a similarly slow drawl, if one easier to bear than the misery of that first night, with Maze folding herself into the chair beside Linda’s bed a thousand different ways like some poor imitation of the origami animals Trixie occasionally brought home from school.

She hadn’t left the room at all during that time — Lucifer said she was haunting the place, but it was with an affectionate gleam in his eye — except for a few brief sprints to the washroom and the alley of vending machines when the floor went quiet and no one (well, specifically Linda) would miss her. Lucifer had brought a change of clothes for her, unasked, and a stack of fugitive profiles to skim through for potential jobs, as well as an embarrassingly elaborate arrangement of flowers that Linda seemed vaguely bemused by, as if she couldn’t understand the fuss.

It  _did_ rather tower over the other bouquets and cards that had accumulated on the windowsill, and over Linda herself, Maze had to admit. But the size of Lucifer’s guilt, and how he chose to express it through such excessive material displays instead of words was something she understood, perhaps too well.

Maze read the messages penned into each card to Linda when she was awake — which was, unsurprisingly, not that often — and in return listened to Linda’s patient, if at times adorably meandering, descriptions of the colleagues, and a lesser number of friends and relatives, who had heard the news somehow and sent their well wishes.

She listened with a mingling of fascination and suspicion (a pang of regret, too, for having never wondered much before about Linda’s life outside of her dealings with the devil) for these other people who knew Linda, who cared enough to pay for priority mail but not enough to actually show their faces.  

It had never seemed odd to her, before, how Linda had all but dropped everything in her life to help solve the problems they had so unceremoniously dropped on her week after week — even those that fell well beyond her occupational purview, like breaking into (and out of) hospitals and crossing a number of ethical boundaries along the way — as if she had nothing…  _else_ to do. She had always had a particular skill for turning conversation away from herself, dodging (mostly-unasked) questions about her personal life and past, which Maze had imagined was some ground rule for therapists but now felt like something that ran deeper to the bone.

There had been the curious way, too, that Linda had said, so seriously,  _“There are things you don’t know_   _about me”_   the last time they had been in this place. It echoed now in Maze’s ears, troubling her on some primal, nameless level as she sat in a stillness measured out in heartbeats.

She didn’t mind that Linda spent most of her time sleeping. It meant she could keep watch properly, staring as long as she wanted at the rise and fall of Linda’s chest, at the scroll of vitals across three different monitors, without having to make excuses for her vigilance, or for the case files so often left lying forgotten in her lap.

The times when Linda woke were more fraught, a delicate tripwire of unspoken wonderings, of new and dangerous  _feelings_ , strung between them that neither particularly wanted to set off — well, Maze didn’t, and she wasn’t sure that Linda had the necessary strength to try any untangling herself yet, especially when they kept getting interrupted by the others passing in and out of her room at all hours.

It was bad enough when the nurses came in (brisk and businesslike, which always meant something unpleasant was about to happen) to change Linda’s bandages and assess her condition, debating the various merits and drawbacks of things like wound debridement with the doctor in a way that both horrified and intrigued Maze.

They always shepherded her into the corner when they came, saying they needed room to work, but Maze could see they were wary of her, of the way she glowered back and forth between them and cracked her knuckles slightly-less-than-nonchalantly.

(“They think you’re going to rip their heads off,” Amenadiel whispered to her once, when he noticed all the nurses on the floor glancing over their shoulders at Maze with almost comic regularity. “You could take it down a notch or seven.”)

“So?” she challenged, trying not to sound pleased by the news. It was better that they knew where they stood, and where she stood — firmly between any possible threat, the slightest discomfort, and her still-healing friend.)

It was hard to watch from the corner, though, minding whatever invisible boundary the nurses had established like a kenneled dog, when she could see that their touches, as gentle as they tried to make them, hurt Linda, who never flinched but went still and quiet instead, compressing her pain into the thin line of her lips.

All it took was a moment of inattention, some small action from the nurse on the left that pulled an involuntary whimper from Linda, to turn Maze sharp again, unfolding like a switchblade to come at them over the bed, to come at them in any way she could.

_Careless_ human.

“You’re  _hurting_ her,” she spat as they backed away from her, the terror in their eyes so familiar, returning the world to its proper alignment:  _this_ was how humans were supposed to look at her, righteously afraid and penitent.

And things would have quickly devolved into bloodshed, into hearing  _them_ whimper and beg, had Linda not twined a hand up Maze’s wrist and said, with infinite calm, “It’s fine, Maze. I’m fine.”

Maze closed her eyes against the lie, but she let the doctor hold her in place with the soft pressure of her fingers, let her desires to bite and hit and flay ebb and retreat to whatever shadowy vestibule of her heart they had learned to hide in.

“Sorry.”

They didn’t try to force her into the corner again. She was going to  _owe_ Lucifer for all the strings he was pulling to make them tolerate her presence, wasn’t she?

She twitched her wrist free from Linda’s grasp, finding her hand and taking it (holding it) properly this time, the way humans seemed to like for how often they sought each other out this way.

She had held hands with Trixie before, but she didn’t remember feeling so warm then, as if someone had struck a match and left it to burn under her rib cage.

She was relieved when Linda was resting comfortably again, their hands still loosely joined even after the nurses had tiptoed away, and Maze could tremble at what she would have done, at what she would do, to those simply doing their jobs, to those trying to  _help_.

Almost worse than that afternoon, though, was waiting for Linda to remember she was a therapist and broach those ‘discussions for another time’ they kept skirting around — about Maze not having a soul, and about Linda missing the most basic instinct to protect herself, and about Maze refusing to leave the hospital and scaring the hospital staff and holding onto Linda’s hand like she would fall apart without that touchstone.

It was unclear how much Linda remembered of her… mistreatment at the hands of the Goddess, and of all the things that had come afterward, and Maze hoped it was little, for both of their sakes.

(She should have known better.)

It began with Linda trying to thank her again, getting halfway through the phrase  _for saving m—_ before Maze couldn’t stomach it anymore and said, sharply, “You’ve already done that.  _Thanked_ me.”

If Linda was stung by her tone, she didn’t show it. “I know. I just wanted to say it slightly more… coherently this time.”

She could feel Linda’s eyes on her, serious and searching in that way she had, the one that made Maze feel impossibly  _seen_ , unbearably unmasked sometimes.

“How long has it been — two days?”

“Three,” Maze corrected, still terse, though she wasn’t entirely sure of the count herself.

“Oh.” Linda frowned, the discovery that she had lost more time than she had realized apparently unwelcome knowledge.

“You don’t need to, you know, feel like you have to  _stay_ here, Maze,” she started over, and though her voice was pitched with lightness, with care, what she was saying hit Maze like a brick to the head. “Just because I’m stuck here for now doesn’t mean anyone else should be, and, well… watching me sleep can’t be that fascinating.”

_You’d be wrong_ , Maze thought. She ground her teeth until she could be sure she would sound like herself — cool, unaffected — when she spoke. “You want me to leave?”

“No,” Linda said quietly, and there was a peculiar sort of strain underlying the word, a thread that Maze wanted to catch onto before the doctor could take it back.

“No, honestly, you being here has been… kind of amazing.” Linda’s voice had changed again, into the affectionate, almost-amused inflection she used when Maze had surprised her with something, in the best way. “Unexpected, and unnecessary, but… it’s nice to have the company.”

Having won that admission, Maze settled back into her chair, crossing her arms with great satisfaction. “Then I’m good where I am.”

This time Linda really did laugh. “Wait, that doesn’t mean I can’t still be worried about you. Even demons forged in the bowels of Hell need to see the sun once in awhile, right?”

For a moment, Maze thought she might continue to fight the doctor on this (she was right to stay so near, she knew that beyond all else), but if she could quiet Linda’s worry by walking around the block a few times, it was worth the trouble — the questions neither was quite ready to answer — she would spare them both.

“You saying I need a shower?”

Linda shared her conspiratorial smile. “Well…”

And so Maze hauled herself to her feet, trying to ignore the need to stretch and the subtle sound of cracking joints running down her spine as she straightened, and how they betrayed all the contorting and kinking she had demanded from her body over the last days.

“That makes it three now, you know,” she said thoughtfully as she stood by the bed, stuck somewhere between the ease of staying and the effort of making herself walk away. It didn’t feel right to just  _leave_ , and so she lingered, letting her fingers trail dangerously close to Linda’s hand.

“Is that supposed to mean something?” Linda asked, squinting up at her. “Help a still-heavily-medicated girl out.”

“Things you’ve been wrong about,” Maze clarified, hoping Linda wouldn’t ask for any more specifics lest she was forced to explain exactly why it  _was_ so fascinating to watch the woman sleep.

“Oh? I don’t know if it’s worrying or flattering that you think I’ve been wrong only three times since I met you.”

Maze shrugged, trying not to think too hard about the slight emphasis Linda had placed on  _since I met you_ , and what that slender weight might mean. (It  _didn’t_ mean anything, of course; the quietude of the hospital was probably getting to her, making her hear things.)

“Just the truth. I don’t do flattery.” She thought for a second. “Unless I’m getting paid.”

“Duly noted.”

This time it was Linda who navigated the narrow space between them and found Maze’s hand, pressing her fingers against Maze’s palm and squeezing gently, with her soft reminder  _take your time_ carrying Maze into the hallway when she finally managed to free herself, weakly, from that electric line of contact.

It was no different than the other thousand friendly gestures they had exchanged before, all those casual ways humans brushed their bodies against each other, but Maze felt everything around her —  _in_ her — quicken, and then slow,  _slow_ : determined not to be rushed but distinctly falling, headlong, towards something she dared not try to put a name to.

And she wondered if it would always be like this, with Linda — this much  _wanting_ , and waiting, and knowing that she didn’t care, at all, that it all felt a bit like torture.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a companion piece to this in the works, which will hopefully continue to explore Maze/Linda and move their relationship forward in a more romantic direction (and see them dealing with a lot of things I suspect they are determinedly Not Dealing With at the moment, because trauma is fun like that). I mean, as far as I'm concerned they're already canon, so. Yeah.
> 
> Would love to hear your thoughts and/or gush over these two (seriously, I have a lot of feelings) here or over at @loveexpelrevolt on tumblr. Thanks for reading!


End file.
